Obama’s $77 Billion climate funds stash found – will be gutted

To Protect $77 BillionClimate Funds, Obama Stashed It Where It’s Hard to Find

Bloomberg, 15 March 2017
Christopher FlavellePresident Donald Trump will find the job of reining in spending on climate initiatives made harder by an Obama-era policy of dispersing billions of dollars in programs across dozens of agencies — in part so they couldn’t easily be cut.

There is no single list of those programs or their cost, because President Barack Obama sought to integrate climate programs into everything the federal government did. The goal was to get all agencies to take climate into account, and also make those programs hard to disentangle, according to former members of the administration. In some cases, the idea was to make climate programs hard for Republicans in Congress to even find.

“Much of the effort in the Obama administration was to mainstream climate change,” said Jesse Keenan, who worked on climate issues with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and now teaches at Harvard University. He said all federal agencies were required to incorporate climate-change plans into their operations.

The Obama administration’s approach will be tested by Trump’s first budget request to Congress, an outline of which is due to be released Thursday. Trump has called climate change a hoax; last November he promised to save $100 billion over eight years by cutting all federal climate spending. His budget will offer an early indication of the seriousness of that pledge — and whether his administration is able to identify programs that may have intentionally been called anything but climate-related.

The last time the Congressional Research Service estimated total federal spending on climate was in 2013. It concluded 18 agencies had climate-related activities, and calculated $77 billion in spending from fiscal 2008 through 2013 alone.

But that figure could well be too low. The Obama administration didn’t always include “climate” in program names, said Alice Hill, director for resilience policy on Obama’s National Security Council.

“Given the relationship that existed with Congress on the issue of climate change, you will not readily find many programs that are entitled ‘climate change,’” Hill, who is now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, said in an interview. At the Department of Defense, for example, anything with the word climate would have been “a target in the budget process,” she said.

The range of climate programs is vast, stretching across the entire government.

So, let me see if I understand this. If climate scientists don’t mention climate change in their grant request, they don’t get the grant. But if POTUS creates a climate change initiative in a Federal program, he DOESN’T mention climate change?

I wish it was that easy. But they are not going to be labeled as such. Still, he has time to find them. And cutting 20% across the board will help. Then the agencies will have to decide if salaries are more important than pseudo science.

When it comes to legal and lawful executive action (within statutory bounds), there are no checks and balances. Anything that can be done by executive action can also be undone by executive action. And no, the founding fathers would not be turning in their graves, the one thing that they understood is that the ultimate check and balance was reserved for the citizens. not vested in government.

Direct election of Senators ensured that the states would become an after thought and only what happened at the Federal level would matter anymore.
It used to be that Senators served at the pleasure of the state governments, and if they did anything that harmed the states, they wouldn’t be returned.
Now everybody in Washington only cares about increasing Federal power.

“Not with ideologue extremist judges working outside the law to defend the Obama “vision” at every turn.”

Leftwing judges are to be expected in the Ninth Circuit Court and Obama has been in Office eight years, so he has had a chance to appoint a lot of ideologues, but that won’t stop Trump unless the Supreme Court upholds the lower courts order. Btw, I think Trump has the opportunity to appoint over 100 lower court judges during this term.

I don’t think the Supreme Court will rule against the President, especially if Gorsuch is on the Bench, but if they do rule against the President, then it *is* time to start worrying about the Judicial Branch.

The Federal Judge has no legal leg to stand on in halting Trump’s order. He didn’t even address the actual law that applies to Trump’s actions. The law is very simple: The President has the Constitutional and legislative authority to ban *anyone* who is not a U.S. citizen or legal resident, from the U.S., that he decides to ban. Period.

The President could announce that he was banning ALL Muslims, or all new immigrants from any nation, from entering the U.S. and would be perfectly within his legal rights. The President is the one who decides who comes and who doesn’t come to the U.S, not a federal judge. That’s what the U.S. Constitution and the law say.

The law the federal judge cited is completely irrelevant to the case. I think conservatives need to see if they can impeach this judge since he obviously doesn’t know how to interpret law correctly. He certainly shouldn’t be getting any promotions while Republicans are in power.

Bottom line: If the Supreme Court is still obeying the U.S. Constitution, then we are still in good shape, even if some lower courts do not.

All DoS climate funds were zeroed. Have to be because UNFCCC recognized Palestine as a member state in April 2016. The December $500 million Obama sent the Green Climate fund was illegal under the clear, simple law passed in 1994. Lots of swamp remains to be drained.

Especially hard because the swamp is full of both career Democrats and Republicans. Their number one priority is to get themselves reelected no matter the cost. It is high time for term limits on these scoundrels.

We don’t need term limits, vote them out of Office. It’s time to start putting political pressure from their home states on these uncooperative Republicans.

It probably won’t affect someone like McCain who is probably dancing his last dance in the Senate anyway, but the others should be feeling the heat. I’ve already decided I’m donating to Susan Collin’s Republican opponent in the next election, and I’m not even from her state. I think I’ll write a note to her informing her of that, too.

She voted against Trump’s education head because she supports the Teachers Unions, and she says she is going to vote against the Health Care Bill if it defunds Planned Parenthood. Collins doesn’t sound like much of a Republican to me. She sounds like a pain in the backside. With the margins in the U.S. Senate so small, all it takes is few of these nincompoops to really screw things up.

If they really do screw things up, I would expect to see Trump out campaigning for their Republican opponents at the next election. They are not going to get to screw the U.S. over their petty little issues and not pay some sort of price.

Deepstate is going to be a problem. But there are many starter targets. List of who worked on climate change at EPA, and who was responsible for the misleading website? Who did the completely misleading wind LCOE at EIA? Who at NSF failed to oversee Shukla? Who at DoE pushed for Solyndra, Aquion, …

Long story short. We didn’t win the war at Midway. The Japanese had zero chance of winning a war against the USA. Everybody knew it. There was zero chance Japan would invade the US mainland. The war against Japan was a joke. It was only so bloody (island hopping) in large part because MacArthur wanted a land war. He got one. What was gained by invading the Philippines? So bloody and useless, And it delayed the attack on Iwo Jima. If that place were attacked instead of the Philippines, it would have been a walk over.Instead, the Japanese fortified it and it was a very, very bloody invasion.

In essence MacArthur fought the war the Japanese wanted him to fight.

Japan was beaten by a massively dominant US Navy and the pathetic state of Japanese logistics

Your analysis (which is not bad) is predicated on that fact that we were going to win from the outset. That is not a given, Just like The 1927 Yankees playing the 1962 Mets, you still have to play the game to determine the outcome. However, given how WWII played out, your statement is correct. Midway was not when the US won the war. It was when it stopped the Japan expansion. Midway put Japan on the defensive sooner rather than later.

Island hopping was done instead of conquering each island in turn. It was determined that by taking out key islands, the remaining islands wouldn’t have the material resources to continue to fight and could be safely ignored.
Conquering islands was needed to give us land bases from which to attack the Japanese mainland.
Do you really believe we could have built enough ships to carry all the men and material and gotten all of them all the way across the Pacific, in order to mount an invasion of the Japanese Islands?

I believe Joel’s point was that the Philippines was not a necessary bunch of Islands to hop. And in that I agree with him. However, the goodwill it created with the Filipinos, and allies in general, was probably worth the diversion.

Carriers won WWII, of that no one with any knowledge would debate. But like the battleships of the WWI, they are now an anachronism. They will not win the next major war. As they are sitting targets.

What they do is help project power to remote corners of the earth for the small countries that think the way to domination is to gobble up small neighbors. But more importantly, they are a quick way to move massive amounts of aid (in the form of electrical power, water and food) to remote areas devastated by natural disasters. Kind of ironic, but the primary use of Carriers now is for goodwill and peace. Not war.

$77M from 2008 to 2013 is a total that is “on a ramp” – no way spending averaged $11M in 2008, so the exit from 2013 must have been higher than that – want to bet it’s averaging more like $15B now? That’s some serious savings over the next 8 years that will fund a lot of good stuff.

In the years 2008 and 2009 the federal budget was increased dramatically with the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and Troubled Asset Relief Program. In the next several years no budgets were formally passed and the government was funded through reconciliation bills. These reconciliation bills (under Harry Reid and Pelosi) did not specify where the money would go as specifically as a formal budget, they just increased Departmental funding based on the inflated 2008 and 2009 budgets. This gave Obama and Reid the ability to squirrel away mass sums of money without proper accounting.

The presidents budget fur climate change was circa $22 billion every year. There was $$ elsewhere and every where like the requirement that the DoD spend $26/gal for fuel for the Navy. I don’t think anyone really knows how much has been wasted, think about the $1 billion that was sent to the UN just as Obama departed. There were slush funds every where, they even found $$$ to send to his friends in Cambodia.

Since, “the science is settled”, a simple executive order banning the expenditure of any funds in regard to man-made climate change should suffice and there ought be no objections from those who believe “the debate is over”.

CtM, yes. All renewables subsidies should be zeroed. But that takes an act of Congress. And foodstamps should only be available to legal residents, and only used for real food, not soda and chips. Another act of congress. So far, congress is not looking very good on appointments and healthcare repeal/replace. We shall see.

If you have an EBT card, there are plenty of “folks” willing to sell you ANYTHING using that card; of course at a suitably large discount in their favor.

It’s the E_verybody B_ut T_axpayers card.

And laws saying you can only buy “real” food don’t work very well.

Not too long ago (this year) I was standing in the checkout line at the Safeway store with my MIL ordered yellow corn tortillas (for dinner).
I noticed that the very stylishly dressed and bejewelled businesslike woman in front of me, was unloading a good sized shopping cart full of groceries , onto the conveyor belt. A quick glance indicated it was beyond my pay scale. plenty of fancy meats; designer fake water, you know the common yuppie stuff. Well if you like it, buy it, no skin off my teeth; and it was apparent she could afford it.
Just ten seconds sufficed to conclude she lived well, so I went back to minding my own business, and admiring my yellow corn tortillas.
I was awakened from my trance, by the store Clerk !

” That’s not covered; you’ll have to pay cash for that !” , she was saying to the aforementioned shopper, who was running her card through the scanner slot.

Then I noticed she was scanning an EBT card, and the Clerk’s screen was showing $100 plus on the card, and some $15 or so for the “cash only” items.

Other than being ethnicaly advantaged, she didn’t appear to me to be particularly indigent; and indigency seems quite rare in Si valley for :that “category”.
Well none of my business of course, but sheer curiosity got me to follow her out of the store, as my transaction was done for while she was still reloading her shopping cart.
Surprise ! she wheeled her cart to the rear of a black LEXUS hybrid SUV parked right in front next to the blue handicapped spot (which was available to use.) And her goodies were duly loaded into that fancy set of wheels.

As I say, it is not any of my business what people buy for themselves in the way of food; good, bad even ugly (the food). That’s why we have such a wide choice.

But just how the heck that person came to be sporting an EBT card is something I can’t figure.
Some days later I did get the chance and priced that particular Lexus hybrid SUV at the local dealer (near my Subaru dealer), and it window stickered at over $56,000.

I’m happy that the truly indigent, can get assistance, and have volunteered at food service locations, and also will buy a Egg McMuffin and coffee occasionally for someone who clearly is in need. And NO I am not by my nature, a generous person.
But I had a need once (eons ago), and appreciated the help I got.

So it totally frosts me when the scammers are able to beat the system, which is trying to aid the needy.
The village square stocks should be re-instituted.

I think restricting food stuffs to particular types might be a bridge too far. Soup up the soda with vitamins and minerals and presto! you have a new category. Besides, my wife makes a mean from-scratch 5-cheese Mac-‘n-Cheese topped with a crushed Dorito’s crust. You couldn’t be so cruel!

“So far, congress is not looking very good on appointments and healthcare repeal/replace. We shall see.”

The Senate Democrats are the people in Congress who are to blame for the holdup in appointments.

Trump had a meeting today with a bunch of Republicans and he said afterwards that those he met with were mostly unsure or against voting for the health care act, and when they left the meeting, Trump said everyone of them were onboard. A lot of the confusion you see related to this issue is stirred up by the MSM. Trump thinks things are going pretty good on health care.

Wind production nails it perfectly. I always wondered what kind power is produced by the wind turbines rotating vigorously while meadows beneath them are covered in mist (due to wind not being there at all).

There are civil servants who know. This will be found. I hope Trump is aware of O’s $500M he also chucked to IPCC as he went put the door. He should demand it back or cut another billion off the UN budget plan as recovery and a penalty.

Doesnt work like that. No President chucks money at anything without Congressional approval. It has to be a line item in the budget, fat chance of it getting through the House. back in 2011 they would cut anything like that.

Federal funding for climate change research, technology, international assistance, and adaptation has increased from $2.4 billion in 1993 to $11.6 billion in 2014, with an additional $26.1 billion for climate change programs and activities provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009. As shown in figure 1, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has reported federal climate change funding in three main categories since 1993:

technology to reduce emissions,
science to better understand climate change, and
international assistance for developing countries.

You are right it is the tip of the iceberg the Presidents report to Congress reported $ 22 Billion annually, the website is gone that showed that. I could never reconcile why there were two different numbers, the latter must have included some items not shown in your number.

What a terrible indictment about the state of USA government. Being devious, hiding money, deliberately disguising projects. Not really open democratic procedure is it, more like third world scammers. Mind you, wasn’t Obama born in the third world ?

Leftists are convinced that the people aren’t smart enough to rule themselves, that’s why we need government to run everything for us.
Unfortunately the same people who aren’t smart enough to rule ourselves are in charge of the government.

This story gives some idea of how deeply climate change is baked into the Department of Defence.

The problem is that climate change is natural and happens anyway. It’s probably wise to consider the consequences. For instance, what happens if the levee breaks in New Orleans? Oh wait, that actually happened. Wasn’t that the fault of the Army Corps of Engineers? They probably could have saved some lives if they weren’t wasting their time on renewable energy and spent their time doing what they were mandated to do.

The president needs to find about half a trillion in savings over the 2016 budget to balance the books if that reported deficit is right. That won’t happen in one year or even 4, they will have to cut severely and rely on an improving economy to increase the tax take to start closing that gap (or raise taxes).
15 billion per year helps. Of course saying that he will cut spending of 100 billion over 8 years, i.e. just over 16 billion a year, does not balance the books but it sounds good, enormous to many, but totally meaningless in the the scheme of things. However it looks like it that he has found the more or less 100 billion over 8 years as promised just with this (if correct), another promise fulfilled.
He now has to find another 485 billion in spending cuts and increased income. To balance the books the money he saves by cutting this off, or anything else for that matter, can not be spent elsewhere. Increasing defense spending, as suggested, by cutting other spending will create employment in that area (take it away elsewhere) but it does not close the gap. The budget presentation will be interesting.
As for all countries that run annual deficits one day they have to start to spend less then they earn to avoid becoming total tax slaves to satisfy the interest bill from a foreign finance master.

That is not possibble. The deficit is mainly in entitlements. Unless you cut the Pentagon budget in half, there simply is not enough discretionary spending to eliminate the deficit. That is why entitlement and tax reform are vital. Speaker Ryan is well aware of the problem.

Even cutting the defense budget entirely wouldn’t rub out the deficit. The somewhat magical number is $600 million. That’s the amount of income all earners at $200,000 and above bring in. If your deficit is over that, the time to a balanced budget can not be less than infinity. In practical terms of course the limit is much lower.

Entitlement is a false premise.
Entitlement is a description that assumes a person did not work hard and earn what others wrongly term entitlement.

My career was in the Federal Government.
For over 2/3rds of my career, I paid into Social Security as an official part of my retirement under FERS (Federal Employee Retirement System). As were hundreds of thousands other Federal employees.

That makes Social Security an official, and substantial as it turns out, of my retirement.

We had zero say in the matter. Nor is it our fault that the Federal Government used our retirement payments to offset Federal debt, rather than establish a forward looking retirement fund.

For many other Americans who also paid substantial sums into Social Security during their work life, Social Security is a fundamental portion, if not entirely, of their retirement.

Social Security and Medicare are the largest of the things called entitlements, but if I recall correctly, they have only been in deficit twice and those in deep recession years. The payroll tax is still sufficient to cover their costs, but will not be in a few years. It makes far more sense to raise the payroll tax cap than to start cutting them for present recipients.

ristvan March 16, 2017 at 11:02 am
“The deficit is mainly in entitlements.”
Nope. The deficit is caused by an imbalance of tax revenue and total spending.
For the longest time Soc Sec took in a surplus. That surplus was used to fund other government spending.
Now when SS is no longer a cash cow and the bonds need to be repaid we hear entitlements.

First move to balance the budget, something we needed to do in 2001; War bonds,to pay for the wars we fought. It worked for all the other modern wars.

There is and was a lot of unnecessary spending. Entitlements, mean just that the person paid into a system. It is a contract, like any other.

We are going to have to grow the economy, and tailor it to expanding domestic participation in labor.
Get as many people working as we have people.

ATheoK, you had no say in any of the taxes that you paid to the government. SS is nothing more than another tax. The money you put in was given to someone else years ago. The only way for you to be paid would be form money to be taken from someone else. Then they have to rely on money stolen from someone else to get theirs back.

Stan, It’s been years since the SS admin took in enough money to cover what’s going out. In fact the trust fund will officially run dry in about 10 more years. If nothing is done, at that point SS payout will be cut by about a third so that payouts will be the same as income.

If something is right, you don’t have to hide it or call it something else. If you are trying to hide things, and if you are deliberately giving programs misleading names, YOU ARE BEING DISHONEST.

Intentional dishonesty is a sign that a person knows that he is doing something wrong. If AGW initiatives and whatnot are so necessary, so mainstream, so “desired”, why hide them? Have the courage of your convictions.

For every budget submission that is submitted accurate and well stated, there are fifty submitted badly.

The closer a budget request is to the workfloor environment, the less descriptive the description and less clear the numbers.
Working with line supervisors to fill out their budgets often requires several cooperative attempts juggling estimated workload, estimated productivity and resulting workhours.

Were/are they hiding something?
No!
But they did view their having to develop budgets as a waste of time. Especially, when they discover the reason they have to develop and approve a budget is to hold them responsible for achieving the budget.

Marketing, Engineering, Human Resources department budget submissions run the gamut from skeletal to thousands of somewhat similar requests.

Those similar requests are an attempt to game any 20% or similar straight cut reductions. When a straight cut wipes out 20% of the bogus requests, there are still 80% of their requests receiving funds to fill their coffers for the year.

This is before searching for ‘hidden’ budget submissions. But how hidden can hidden budget submissions actually appear?
If the POTUS mandated something, there is a chain of reporting so some top dogs can keep track.

As Tom Halla mentions below, the only good response is to zero base the budgets. A process that most of the government does not understand.

The government tends to use last years actual as this years budget basis. A wrong headed idea that enables gaming the budget submission process and rewards the nonperformers.

A zero based budget starts with estimated workload and estimated income.
Hours are allocated according to workload; ideally every office is under the same workload standards that are set by the most efficient departments. Again, rewarding nonperformance is a bad way to manage any work group.

There are many Federal Government bureaucracies that need efficiency improvements in process and deliverables; think SSA.

I wouldn’t go that far. Using deceptive names just means you are trying to fool someone. It’s quite possible that the person being deceptive actually believes what they are doing is justified, just knows that those in charge, or paying the bills wouldn’t approve.

That seems to be the case with most leftists, they are so convinced in the rightness of whatever they are doing, that they believe lying about it is justified.

How about cutting anything and everything that even mentions climate, global-warming, or carbon? That seems like a good start.

Then wait and see who complains loudly and rudely in the MSM, and cut every other program they are associated with. Some of it could then be spent on sensible and deserving projects, not people predicting and hoping for the end of the world due to global warming. There is a lot to be done before sanity is restored.

There are multiple fields for entries in a budget system; far more than just titles and numbers.

Typically, there is a summary description and a more detailed justification.

To identify and separate non-essential from essential budget requests, assume every budget request must be justified by the submitting Controller/Finance/Manager/etc.

Identify the possible budget allocation as amounts far less than normal; say as suggested above, 50% less than last year.
Specifically identify renewables/carbon/CO2/climate/weather/alternative energy/etc. as especially targeted for reductions/elimination.
Explain that it will be far far better to identify climate related finances now, than to be discovered at some future date as a rogue undercover program ripe for official investigations.
This motivates the lower level financial people to scrub anything unnecessary or highlight problems.

Searches within a budget system can be extensive utilizing keywords or combinations of keywords to find any program with any hint of relation to climate activity.

There is a secondary series of approaches that can help flush out those motivated to be climate activists.
Restrict access to finance summary line number and detailed reports to specific executives.

Those folks who are possibly herding the cats’ roundup of climate programs will need to request copies or access. It only takes a little questioning to ferret out reasons.

Trump has access to world class financial reporting experts. I expect that they will have even more tricks up their sleeves.

Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
The era of Big Government and “climate crisis inc”, funded by billions upon billions of dollars of taxpayers money, under the guise of “saving the planet” being uncovered and drained from the bureaucratic swamp.